By John F. Harris and Thomas W. Lippman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, May 29, 1998; Page A33

Hours after Pakistan announced that it had exploded five nuclear bombs, President Clinton moved swiftly yesterday to impose stiff economic sanctions to punish the Islamabad government for ignoring his repeated personal appeals over the past two weeks to forgo matching rival India in testing weapons.

"By failing to exercise restraint and responding to the Indian test, Pakistan lost a truly priceless opportunity to strengthen its own security, to improve its political standing in the eyes of the world," Clinton said. "And although Pakistan was not the first to test, two wrongs don't make a right."

Pakistan's action was a blunt repudiation of presidential diplomacy. Clinton went to bed Wednesday night after a midnight phone call to Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif urging him not to test, the fourth such appeal he has made in recent days. Shortly after waking up yesterday, he took a call from Sharif in which the prime minister said he had gone ahead with testing anyway.

In what one senior administration official described as a "quite cool" tone, Clinton told Sharif, "I think you've made a terrible mistake for your country." By law, Clinton had no choice but to impose the sanctions, just as he did on India when it ignited what the United States fears will be a dangerous nuclear arms race with its own nuclear tests on May 11 and May 13. The sanctions include a commitment by the United States to oppose assistance to Pakistan by the International Monetary Fund and other multilateral lending organizations. Pakistan benefits heavily from such aid, including the $1.6 billion it receives from an IMF program. U.S. funding of $293 million from the Export-Import Bank is in jeopardy. Additionally, White House officials said, various defense sales and other exports requiring administration licenses -- worth about $60 million last year -- will now be barred.

Even as Clinton moved to punish Pakistan, the White House made clear that its displeasure was not as acute as it was toward India. "The tonal quality of the way we have addressed this decision by Pakistan . . . is different and we would acknowledge that there's a difference in the way these two governments have dealt with the United States," said White House press secretary Michael McCurry. "Prime Minister Sharif was honest and straightforward in the description of the decision that he was wrestling with and . . . India was manifestly not."

A senior administration official said Sharif told Clinton that he would have preferred not to test, but that "domestic political pressures" in his own country gave him no alternative.

Still unclear is whether Clinton will go ahead with a planned trip to both India and Pakistan scheduled for November. An administration official familiar with the deliberations said the White House has not yet decided whether it regards the trip as a possible incentive to encourage both nations to renounce further tests and sign on to a treaty banning them, or -- through its cancellation -- as an opportunity to emphasize U.S. displeasure.

A senior administration official said Clinton probably would not make the decision for weeks or more. Whether the president goes to the region or not, however, senior officials made little effort to hide their dismay over Pakistan's action, which left the administration's policy toward the region in tatters.

Less than six months ago, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright set off for India and Pakistan on a mission to forge a new U.S. relationship with the two bitter rivals, a relationship in which they would exercise nuclear restraint and the United States would develop broad ties with them based on economic investment and a drive for regional stability.

What the United States got instead is a tit for tat exchange of nuclear tests by hostile neighbors, confronting each other along the flash point of the disputed Kashmir province, and probably lacking the discipline of a nuclear doctrine and command-and-control structure that kept the United States and the Soviet Union from attacking each other during the Cold War.

"The United States and the Soviet Union spent a long time getting this problem right, and we had a lot of hairy moments along the way," Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott said. Talbott headed a delegation Clinton sent to Pakistan after the Indian tests to dissuade Pakistan from testing -- an effort that officials said was probably doomed from the start because the United States could not assemble a package of economic incentives, security assurances or outright threats sufficient to overcome the domestic pressure on Sharif to test.

"We're disappointed but not surprised," one senior official said. "There has been a feeling for some time that we were swimming upstream on this one."

Talbott and other officials said the United States will turn its attention to persuading India and Pakistan not to provoke each other and to agree not to conduct further tests. The administration has five objectives, Talbott said: to persuade both countries to refrain from further tests; get them to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, barring further tests; "take decisive steps to reduce tensions"; encourage negotiations on a treaty barring further production of plutonium or other fissile materials; and dissuade them from deploying ballistic missiles on which nuclear warheads could be mounted.

The theme of the U.S. argument, Talbott and other officials said, will be that India and Pakistan have undermined rather than enhanced their security by opening the nuclear door, and that they will be political and economic outcasts until they reverse course.

As expected, Pakistan's tests put an immediate end to moves on Capitol Hill to relieve Pakistan of previously imposed sanctions as an inducement not to test.